I lost 3 of my 50 foot tall rock monsters last night. What a shame. It all started when I saw an "alpha" tyrannosaurus hanging out on a beach on the way home. I thought maybe I'd oughta kill him, even though it was a level 74 alpha dinosaur. Sounded like a pretty big deal - I killed one before but was only a level 9 or something, so I figured 3 rock guys would be the right call. (I actually wanted to fight him with my squid in the water, think I'd have had the advantage, but I couldn't get him to swim after me - it was actually very frustrating, a lot of wasted time.) So, I'd like to say goodbye to atlas, to stonesmack, and most especiallly to mount.doom, who was my most powerful rock guy, a level 79 himself when I first met him, and we spent a lot of good time together smashing rocks to level him up to like 140 or so. I spent at least 20 minutes with him smashing rocks, that's true friendship. But he's gone now. I still have a couple at home, I didn't take everyone (probably a good thing too)... I still have rock.collector and red.@$@3ing.rock, who was the original rock. I will probably find a couple more to replace the losses.

Afterwards I took a poison dragon over there and cheesed him with poison ranged attacks from a cliff. He actually never even looked at me, was too busy trying to eat my big rock guy's dead body. Dumbass tyrannosaur thinks he can eat a rock. He never even looked at me the whole time, just kept "eating" until I hit him with enough poison blasts to kill him. A little bit anticlimactic to be sure, but he had it coming.

PoVModeratorJoined: 21 Aug 2005
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Posted: Thu Jan 11, 2018 11:34 am Post subject:

sonrisu wrote:

And here I thought it was going to be trying to do the input for Dark Metamorphosis that was going to cause the rage quit. :]

I know three spells so far, all of which I triggered by accident fairly early in the game, Dark Metamorphosis is one of them... but yeah, whenever I tried to cast it on purpose it usually failed so I don't use it. For the path to the inverted castle and by that towards a better ending, I had to consult a guide, because I stopped trying to beat Richard(edit: ahem... I mean Richter) after only two failed attempts. :P

Ok, did not find every single relic, probably missing some other things too, spells, familiars, items but I think I am done with the game for now. It was a good run and I'm glad I didn't quit. :D I'll read a guide for the stuff that I missed.
final status:
(edit: oversized image linked, because it broke forum layout) https://abload.de/img/2018_01_12_castlevani82jyj.png_________________0xDB

If you want more, every Castlevania game for GameBoy Advance and Nintendo DS is done in the same style (Exp, Skills, Items). I think that's 5 more games.

The first GBA game isn't as well done, but still a respectable game (SOTN sets the bar way too high). The rest are about as good as you can expect on the system._________________Mike Kasprzak
'eh whatever. I used to make AAA and Indie games | Ludum Dare | Blog | Tweetar

The only problem with that weapon is it essentially breaks the game._________________NoOP / Reyn Time -- The $ is screwing everyone these days. (0xDB)

PoVModeratorJoined: 21 Aug 2005
Posts: 10971
Location: Canadia

Posted: Sat Jan 13, 2018 10:32 pm Post subject:

Yeah, it's too good. My fav weapons are the ones that shoot swords (I forget the name), so dual wielding is extra great. Also I remember there was one with a stupidly large hitbox (I also forget the name)._________________Mike Kasprzak
'eh whatever. I used to make AAA and Indie games | Ludum Dare | Blog | Tweetar

True, it made everything afterwards too easy (also saved some frustration though). On my next run (will play this again perhaps in a year or two) I shall choose not to use it.

Seems I'm Castlevania addicted now as it didn't take long to continue to Castlevania - Circle Of The Moon (or Castlevania - The Name Of The Rose... Baldwin really is a copy of Sean Connery from that movie).

In direct comparison to SOTN, COTM controls felt a little less smooth, a bit clunky even, gravity felt too strong and I had to adapt to new jump/attack timings to successfully hit the candles. New arch enemies are Medusa Heads and Heat Shades... they make vertically challenging areas(and there seem to be more of those than horizontal rooms) extra annoying. :D

Yeah it was. I remember getting that game at the same time i bought my GBA. I played it alot but never finished it. The artifically prolonging of the game made me give it up. Having to farm a handful of levels before being able to beat a boss is just plain boring._________________My Blog | I take steroids for my bad knee. Now I can kick a smart car across the Walmart parking lot![/size]

Slow progress... wall jump is nice but also feels clunky like the other moves and attacks.
_________________0xDB

DiabloContributorJoined: 19 Nov 2015
Posts: 388
Location: :( :(

Posted: Tue Jan 16, 2018 5:20 pm Post subject:

I finished the new Mario recently. It is good and I enjoyed it, but it left me a little unfulfilled. It felt more linear than I expected,
not because it more or less forced you to play the stages in a certain order (occasionally you could randomly pick between 2,
but then you always had to do the other one right after)... although that is certainly a bummer, when compared to mario64
(and we all know I'm comparing this against mario64, one of the greatest games of eternity) where you could actually skip
entire levels if you wanted, and had the wonderful castle as a hub world. No hub world in Odyssey, just a menu with a list
of levels you pick from if you want to go back and forth. And this is surely at least as much of a reflection upon me, my
current tastes and outlooks on games in general etc., but when I defeated Bowser at the end, my emotions were closer
to "finally, grrrr, this has been frustrating" than "oh yes!!! mario!! i winn!!!!". But to be sure, it is creative, charming and
generally very well executed.

PoVModeratorJoined: 21 Aug 2005
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Location: Canadia

Posted: Tue Jan 16, 2018 7:27 pm Post subject:

I played about 2 hours of Dragon Ball FighterZ this past weekend (Open Beta). An hour at the start of the beta (finished the training), then an hour at the end of the beta.

My stream went down about halfway through, so all the footage I have is my first ranked fight.

_________________Mike Kasprzak
'eh whatever. I used to make AAA and Indie games | Ludum Dare | Blog | Tweetar

SiroccoModeratorJoined: 19 Aug 2005
Posts: 9470
Location: Not Finland

Posted: Wed Jan 17, 2018 7:40 am Post subject:

It looks very SF2-styled (with modern garnish) so that's pretty nice._________________NoOP / Reyn Time -- The $ is screwing everyone these days. (0xDB)

PoVModeratorJoined: 21 Aug 2005
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Location: Canadia

Posted: Wed Jan 17, 2018 9:55 am Post subject:

It is. It's actually a team fighter (ala Marvel vs Capcom), but in the clip above we were down to our last fighters, and neither of us really understood the "rock paper scissors" of the game (i.e. ground fireballs can be avoided with pursuit, etc).

Word has it there may be another beta day/weekend (due to how poor the matchmaking was, regular disconnections), but the game is slated to be launched in less than 2 weeks, so heh._________________Mike Kasprzak
'eh whatever. I used to make AAA and Indie games | Ludum Dare | Blog | Tweetar

DiabloContributorJoined: 19 Nov 2015
Posts: 388
Location: :( :(

Posted: Tue Jan 23, 2018 5:51 pm Post subject:

It's been a rough first few hours on AC: Origins for me. In the beginning I wasn't really into the game too much, a mixture of seeming like it started a little slow and also I kept getting killed when I tried to do anything other than follow the quest objective (e.g. ooooh materials, just 3 guards... mayyybee... nope!!! dead! dead!!! again!!! dead!!!) But, I stayed with it and ranked up a little bit (level 11 right now), got some better weapons (finally decent bows), and unlocked some new abilities. So now I'm more into it from a gameplay perspective (story is still take it or leave it for me, though) ... but the damned buggssss!!! It's stupid easy to get the 2-horse carriage stuck on a walll, although I think I found a workaround where you set it to autopliot and it'd eventually get itself unstuck. Anyway, most recently I was playing and the audio just completely cut out. I figured okay, that sucks but I'll just finish off this bandit camp or whatever, then either quit or restart. Well, who knows if I could have, cause course the the game crashed to xbox desktop about 5 minutes later. Then, and this was great because I was in a good mood after that crash, I restarted the game and it stalled out on the load game screen. Damnation, truly. I also glitched into a walled-off area recently, after doing a death from above takedown. Took like 3 minutes to finally luckily get out - I thought I was gonna have to reload checkpoint, would have been extra lame.

Other minor gripes: I keep finding quests that are recommended level +10 above me, and I guess at the same time I'd wandered into an area way over my level on accident. I saw some crocodiles I was gonna hunt, but noticed they were "red skull" difficulty so I had to just run away. I'm also sad about the loading screen that appears when you put the bird away, the scout eagle that lets you tag enemies. If you move more than like 50m in any direction, the game has to reload the assets or whatever for your original location and it takes like 5s on the old xbox sometimes.

Ok, I'm gonna keep going while I'm here. I'm a little disappointed in the sleeping darts. It's because say I'm stalking behind 3 enemies, and they're single file - so I sleeping dart the very last guy, why do the guys ahead of him care at all? But of course, they turn around and they're like, ohhhh hey buddy, what's up you're asleep? Wake up! And the sleeping dart effect is o nly like 20 seconds, then he wakes up and they're all on alert and stuff. So the question for me is, why not just put an arrow in the guy's head and have done with it, cause he's not gonna wake up from that. Only reason I can think of is if you didn't have a powerful enough bow to 1-shot the guy, in which case maybe the sleep dart creates a nice distraction or something. I also suppose if you sleeping darted a guy next to like some oil spills, then his buddies would gather around to wake him up, and I guess you could light them all on fire when they're grouped up or something. I'm hoping/assuming there's fire arrows in the game, I don't have them yet and I really could use some. There is a torch you can throw, so far.

The right bumper button (shoulder button) on my xbox controller doesn't really work great. I mean it works, but sometimes I gotta press it a couple times. Was it the attack button in dark souls? Light attack? I think it was and that worked out alright, so it shouldn't be an issue here, but sometimes it seems like I want to attack a guy and it doesn't happen. That one is obviously a problem on my end, not the game.

DiabloContributorJoined: 19 Nov 2015
Posts: 388
Location: :( :(

Posted: Fri Feb 02, 2018 5:32 pm Post subject:

Great news! I defeated the evil Ice Worm Queen in Ark! Alone! YEs!!!! It was pretty tough! Though there isn't much too it, you just gotta have enough shields - and you gotta hope you can get into your inventory to equip a new one fast enough before you get hit too many times! Wow!!

Been spending the last two or three weeks setting up a RaspberryPI3B with wireless keyboard/mouse and three wireless PS3 controller-replicas. It is actually very easy to setup since RetroPie(based on raspbian) comes as a preinstalled image with an interactive setup script but then tweaking every individual platform emulation to perfection... that's a huge time-sink.

Getting the knockoff PS3 controllers to work flawlessly required patching and recompiling the bluetooth stack and using an external USB-Bluetooth dongle because the PI's internal BT kept losing connection whenever I paired more than two controllers at once.

Another big task was getting the Amiga emulator to run well (using amiberry now with Kickstart ROMS from Cloanto's Amiga Forever and so called WHDLOAD installs which are inofficial harddrive installs of games which normally only ran from disks, so that one does not need to swap disks or suffer through painfully long loading times anymore, feels more like cartridge based games now and brings Amiga Emulation up to the same convenience level as SNES/NES stuff / also amiberry allows putting keyboard inputs on some of the unused controller buttons which improves playing games that require extra keys next to the single fire button normally supported by commodore compatible joysticks).

C64 Emulation is in great shape thanks to things like Easyflash being around for the real thing, which lead to many games being released as cartridge images. The Vice version for the PI allows remapping almost any function from the emulator menu or any keyboard input to arbitrary buttons on the gamepad, so everything can be controlled/played without having to reach for the keyboard.

DOS emulation is the same as everywhere else (DosBox just works).

Apart from C64, Amiga and DOS which each require their own Emulators, pretty much all other platforms (PSX, NES, SNES, MAME, ...) run in a unified environment as libretro cores under retroarch, so they all share a single global configuration with controllers mostly getting mapped automatically from what the frontend "Emulation Station" provides on the system level. Individual games in MAME still sometimes require tweaking controls in the MAME menu.

There is even a lightweight desktop environment (called PIXEL) providing support for X11 based games or for browsing(ROM hunting). Also had no trouble at all compiling and running one of my old Allegro based games in there (tested with tankgame). So... if I ever felt the itch, I could now (in theory) create local shared screen multiplayer games and take them with me wherever I go. (If I do I should however start by adding gamepad support to the tankgame and getting it to run standalone as a proper fullscreen port(minus the X11 requirement) on the pie which hooks into the globally provided configuration data from the "Emulation Station" frontend.)_________________0xDB

PoVModeratorJoined: 21 Aug 2005
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Location: Canadia

Posted: Sun Feb 04, 2018 10:17 am Post subject:

Quote:

Getting the knockoff PS3 controllers to work flawlessly required patching and recompiling the bluetooth stack and using an external USB-Bluetooth dongle

Yeah PS3 controllers use something that's not entirely standard. PS4 controllers however should work out-of-the-box with most modern 4.x Linux kernels. You need a special dongle to use them wirelessly with Windows (wired works fine though). I use them and Xbox 360 controllers interchangeably._________________Mike Kasprzak
'eh whatever. I used to make AAA and Indie games | Ludum Dare | Blog | Tweetar

PoVModeratorJoined: 21 Aug 2005
Posts: 10971
Location: Canadia

Posted: Sun Feb 04, 2018 10:29 am Post subject:

Me? I've been hunting every free moment I could get.

That screenshot is actually from Monday night, but my gear is the same. The game came out Friday. I haven't checked, but I'm pretty sure I'm awfully close to 100 hours as of yesterday (8 days after the game came out).

Been playing *A LOT* with friends. Last night I managed to get to the final boss. Tonight I have to "superbowl party" with my Dad, but the plan is to make an attempt or two against the boss tonight. Quick googling suggests average kill times are between 20 and 35 minutes, so yay.

Of course there's more content than just the final boss, but as soon as I beat him I'll be able to play more casually (rather than obsessively)._________________Mike Kasprzak
'eh whatever. I used to make AAA and Indie games | Ludum Dare | Blog | Tweetar

PoVModeratorJoined: 21 Aug 2005
Posts: 10971
Location: Canadia

Posted: Sun Feb 04, 2018 12:30 pm Post subject:

There we go, and updated shot ('cause a friend and I were comparing). Just 14 hours away from 100 hours._________________Mike Kasprzak
'eh whatever. I used to make AAA and Indie games | Ludum Dare | Blog | Tweetar

DiabloContributorJoined: 19 Nov 2015
Posts: 388
Location: :( :(

Posted: Sun Feb 04, 2018 12:45 pm Post subject:

Ark has been mean to me for the last 3 or 4 days. Although I am excited to have defeated the evil worm queen, I am less excited about the treasures it has been giving me. Most of the times I run through the cave, I am only there to get treasures, not to fight the boss. (too hard!) So I have opened at least 100 treasure boxes, probably closer to 150 of them, and it's horrible how much horrible loot the game gives you. I do appreciate the chainsaw it gave me, and it gave me a flamethrower which is fun to play with (though not really something I'd use for serious combat), but there's way too many duplicates. Sometimes the quality is just ****, and we all know I am do not mean like a **** hotel there! One time a treasure box gave me a blueprint for a primitive stone axe, which is commonly used by level 2 characters to chop down their first tree. That's right - after fighting through multiple horribly dangerous worms that can kill you in 4 or 5 hits even when you're wearing really good armor, it rewarded me with that incredible bounty. It's very sucks. I set up a new "base" out in a desert area, where I can find some treasure chests in the middle of nowhere - it's basically the same thing as fighting the worms, except you don't have to fight anything and the treasure boxes are the same quality. Make sense of that what you will, i.e. it's Ark lol. Anyway, none of those treasure boxes is giving me anything I want, so I've decided I'm going to give "The Division" another chance, partly due to some of the nice comments it's been getting from internet jerks. I'm a level 7 now - I never finished it, got like halfway through and got bored. Might happen again, but I'm gonna try to get to max level just to give it a fair chance to impress me somewhere. I'll tell you wat though, the writing in this game is just horrrrrrrrrrrrible. It's so damned tripe. No one talks like these people. Luckily skip cutscene is a very real option.